In this December 2015, photo Tamir Rice is memorialized near where he was shot and killed by a police officer at a city recreation center in 2014. Investigations and discipline in the case has dragged on for years. Child advocates hope the lasting legacy of Tamir's tragic death might be regular training and a clear policy on how officers interact with children and teens.

In this December 2015, photo Tamir Rice is memorialized near where he was shot and killed by a police officer at a city recreation center in 2014. Investigations and discipline in the case has dragged on for years. Child advocates hope the lasting legacy of Tamir's tragic death might be regular training and a clear policy on how officers interact with children and teens.(Tony Dejak, The Associated Press)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- As the debate over accountability in the 2014 fatal police shooting of Tamir Rice roils on, child advocates hold hope that the most lasting change to come after the 12-year-old's death is that Cleveland ends up with one of the country's most progressive policies for how police interact with children.

Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams has said he supports the creation of a youth policy for the department and training to help officers understand more about juvenile development.

But the department has yet to adopt such a policy and the adolescent and child trauma training has been offered only sporadically. Recent police academy graduates haven't benefited from it before patrolling.

Cleveland police spokeswoman Jennifer Ciaccia said a policy is being drafted but "additional things" need to be done prior to implementation.

Ciaccia said the training program would resume in the future. She didn't have a time frame as to when.

A long process

Lisa Thurau, who heads the Strategies for Youth, approached Williams in December 2015 with an offer to help the department create a comprehensive set of policies for Cleveland's officers. The non-profit already had helped create a "Policing the Teen Brain" training for the department, in hopes more than 1,500 officers would get the 14-hour training.

When Thurau first approached Cleveland, she said she believed the city could be a national leader on the issue. She still does.

With a $10,000 grant from the Ohio Transformation Fund, SFY helped put together a panel of national police policy experts and gathered input from 25 Cleveland leaders with expertise in child and adolescent development.

In August 2016, a recommended policy was given to Cleveland police to review.

"I have every reason to believe that Chief Williams is truly committed to creating a premier policy for youth interactions," Thurau said.

She said she understands the process takes time, and that the city has lots of important policing priorities, including implementing U.S. Department of Justice consent decree reforms. But she doesn't want the youth policy to stall completely.

"It might not seem to some like a huge thing, but for me the stakes are so high," Celeste-Cohen said.

Why?

Because the department needs to build trust and legitimacy with young people in Cleveland who perceive that officers are not held to the same standards of accountability that they are, she said.

Continued fallout from Tamir Rice shooting

In conversations with young people who visit the Schubert Center and in schools, Celeste-Cohen said she continues to hear the same concerns about how patrol officers "roll up" on teens or "come up hot" hopping out of cars only to pepper them with questions about what they might be doing wrong.

One teen, in a recent conversation at an East Side Cleveland high school, shared a story about an officer responding to a call of shots fired into his home.

"The first thing he said was, 'Why people shooting at your house?'" the teen recalled.

The teen said he was shaken because his mom was had nearly been struck by the bullet, and he was further upset at an officer, who also was black, immediately assumed he somehow might be to blame.

It's those types of encounters and feelings from kids that illustrate the urgent need for a policy and training, Celeste-Cohen said.

The continuing fallout from the Tamir case also sheds light on why policies are ultimately central for accountability, Thurau said.

In April, a committee of police and city employees found the two officers involved in the shooting did not violate department policies or procedures.

Last month, the city fired Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed Tamir for lying on this job application.

Frank Garmback, his training officer who drove the car was suspended for 10 days without pay for using improper tactics that put Loehmann at risk. The union representing the officers is appealing both punishments.

"The finding that no policies were violated, it shocked everybody to the core and signals the need for a thoughtful set of policies and practices," Thurau said.

Tamir, who was carrying an air pellet gun, was killed seconds after police arrived at Cudell Recreation Center as they responded to a call of a person waiving a gun outside. A call taker was told the person "was probably" a juvenile and the gun was likely fake but that information wasn't shared with the officers.

Officers who responded didn't have policies that required them to take into account the context and location of calls in places like a playground, a youth center or a pool. Or training to understand that black youth are often perceived to look older than they are. Or an understanding of ways to approach or de-escalate situations with juveniles.

Those things could all be addressed in a new policy, Thurau said.

Thurau said grant money is available to continue training on adolescent and child development, and on the new policy if and when it is completed. The cost to the department's budget would be replacing officers on the streets when others were being trained.

Celeste-Cohen said a new policy wouldn't amount to Monday morning quarterbacking of the Tamir Rice case.

"We can't say what policies would have or might have made a difference," she said.

But it would offer an opportunity to give the community - especially young people -- a sense that something meaningful will come from the loss that they might not get from the investigations, reviews and hearings.

"We have these kind of moral flashpoints in our city. Tamir is one," she said. "To not seize on that for larger growth in our community...I really don't get it."